Last week, CMS reported that 800 hospitals will be required to forfeit 1 percent of their reimbursement for missing the mark on reducing hospital-acquired conditions (HACs). The race to eliminate preventable patient harm has always been a top hospital goal, but now it’s one tied to their reimbursement through the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Hospital-Acquired Condition Reduction Program (HACRP). No matter how hard hospitals work to improve their performance, CMS will penalize the lowest performing quartile (25%) of hospitals annually.

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After much ballyhoo and for years of promising a major overhaul to the cost-prohibitive Obama-era managed care rules, the CMS has issued a proposed regulation that makes smaller changes – not the drastic “gutting” that had been promised — to the standards states meet when running their Medicaid plans.

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Cost containment has become a leading factor in the delivery of healthcare. What are some of the issues that are contributing to these burgeoning costs? One of them is Medicaid. We spent over $576 billion on Medicaid programs in 2017, as reported by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

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